American legislators have proposed that scientific research paid for by US taxpayers should be freely available online to everyone. Analysts described the move as a "potential banana skin" for established scientific publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Springer and Informa.

The proposed new law comes after an independent report for the European commission last month recommended that research funded by European taxpayers should also be available free on the web. In the UK, meanwhile, public funders of research are still considering whether to recommend so-called "open access" to research, despite support for the idea from a committee of MPs. Charitable funders such as the Wellcome Trust have already come out in favour.

The Federal Research Public Access Act - introduced by senators John Cornyn, a Texan Republican, and Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat - would require all federal departments and agencies that invest $100m (£54m) or more in research to demand that articles be put online within six months of publication in a subscription journal.

"It will ensure that US taxpayers do not have to pay twice for the same research - once to conduct it and a second time to read it," Senator Cornyn told Congress.

But the Association of American Publishers warned that the law would jeopardise the integrity of the scientific publishing process. Association member Brian Crawford warned it "would create unnecessary costs for taxpayers, place an unwarranted burden on research investigators, and expropriate the value-added investments made by scientific publishers, many of them not-for-profit associations who depend on publishing income to support pursuit of their scholarly missions".

The US government pumps more than $55bn into research every year. The bulk of that goes to 11 agencies including Nasa and the departments of energy and agriculture. The legislation would also affect the National Institutes of Health, one of the world's largest funders of medical research. The bill was introduced on the first anniversary of a voluntary open access policy introduced by NIH.

Phil Willis, Liberal Democrat MP and chairman of the science and technology select committee, said the proposed US law should serve as a warning to the government this side of the Atlantic that the current model needs to be changed. "This is yet another example of the dissemination of research moving into the 21st century and the UK must not be left behind," he said. "To cling on to what are basically 19th-century principles of publishing research seems to me a rather bizarre concept in the 21st century."

In a note on the proposed law, Panmure Gordon pointed out that Reed Elsevier's academic publishing division accounts for 28% of group revenues and 39% of profits and "the market's main fear ... has always been that the margin ... would crack if new pricing models were introduced".

The broker added that the proposed law "could be a potential banana skin" for the lucrative science publishing arms of companies like Reed.